Something fresh

I just got back from San Francisco and Berkeley where we had an excited audience of surprisingly very few Arabs. I was pleased to see a mostly American audience coming to see a Jordanian film in a US cinema. After one of the Berkeley screenings, a group of college students came up to me and started talking in Arabic. But they were all Americans and Canadians. I was blown away to see so many American students learning Arabic.

One of my old teachers, Leonard Schraeder once said of the whole Bush Iraq war/mess... He said something like this: "It's just like what happened with the Japanese in America during WW2. First the American public didn't know anything about the Japanese. Then they hated them after Pearl Harbor. There was fear and uncertainty. Then it was followed by curiosity. And then understanding." Well, never in my life have I seen this many American students being so curious and fascinated by the Arab world. And to hear them speak Arabic was just refreshing. Maybe we're entering that phase... from hatred to curiosity. Eventually we will come to understanding.